Historical development in Western culture

Fable

The origins of fable are lost in the mists of time. Fables appear independently in ancient Indian and Mediterranean cultures. The Western tradition begins effectively with Aesop (6th century bc), of whom little or nothing is known for certain; but before him the Greek poet Hesiod (8th century bc) recounts the fable of the hawk and the nightingale, while fragments of similar tales survive in Archilochus, the 7th-century-bc warrior-poet. Within 100 years of the first Aesopian inventions, the name of Aesop was firmly identified with the genre, as if he, not a collective folk, were its originator. Like the Greek philosopher Socrates, Aesop was reputed to have been ugly but wise. Legend connected him with the island of Samos; the historian Herodotus believed him to have been a slave.

Modern editions list approximately 200 “Aesop” fables, but there is no way of knowing who invented which tales or what their original occasions might have been. Aesop had already receded into legend when Demetrius of Phaleron, a rhetorician, compiled an edition of Aesop’s fables in the 4th century bc. The poetic resources of the form developed slowly. A versified Latin collection made by Phaedrus, a freed slave in the house of the Roman emperor Augustus, included fables invented by the poet, along with the traditional favourites, which he retold with many elaborations and considerable grace. (Phaedrus may also have been the first to write topically allusive fables, satirizing Roman politics.) A similar extension of range marks the work of the Hellenized Roman Babrius, writing in the 2nd century ad. Among the Classical authors who advanced upon Aesopian formulas may be named the Roman poet Horace, the Greek biographer Plutarch, and the great satirist Lucian of Samosata.

In the Middle Ages, along with every other type of allegory, fable flourished. Toward the end of the 12th century, Marie de France made a collection of over 100 tales, mingling beast fables with stories of Greek and Roman worthies. In another compilation, Christine de Pisan’s Othéa manuscript illuminations provide keys to the interpretation of the stories and support the appended moral tag line. Expanded, the form of the fable could grow into what is called the beast epic, a lengthy, episodic animal story, replete with hero, villain, victim, and endless epic endeavour. (One motive for thus enlarging upon fable was the desire to parody epic grandeur: the beast epic mocks its own genre.) Most famous of these works is a 12th-century collection of related satiric tales called Renard the Fox, whose hero is a fox symbolizing cunning man. Renard the Fox includes the story of the fox and Chantecler (Chanticleer), a cock, a tale soon afterward told in German, Dutch, and English versions (in The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer took it as the basis for his “Nun’s Priest’s Tale”). Soon Renard the Fox had achieved universal favour throughout Europe. The Renaissance poet Edmund Spenser also made use of this kind of material; in his “Mother Hubberd’s Tale,” published in 1591, a fox and an ape go off to visit the court, only to discover that life is no better there than in the provinces. More sage and serious, John Dryden’s poem of “The Hind and Panther” (1687) revived the beast epic as a framework for theological debate. Bernard de Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (first published 1705 as The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest) illustrated the rapacious nature of humans in society through the age-old metaphor of the kingdom of the bees. In modern times, children’s literature has made use of animal fable but often trivialized it. But the form has been taken seriously, as, for example, by the political satirist George Orwell, who, in his novelAnimal Farm (1945), used it to attack Stalinist Communism.

The fable has normally been of limited length, however, and the form reached its zenith in 17th-century France, at the court of Louis XIV, especially in the work of Jean de La Fontaine. He published his Fables in two segments: the first, his initial volume of 1668, and the second, an accretion of “Books” of fables appearing over the next 25 years. The 1668 Fables follow the Aesopian pattern, but the later ones branch out to satirize the court, the bureaucrats attending it, the church, the rising bourgeoisie—indeed the whole human scene. La Fontaine’s great theme was the folly of human vanity. He was a skeptic, not unkind but full of the sense of human frailty and ambition. His satiric themes permitted him an enlargement of poetic diction; he could be eloquent in mocking eloquence or in contrast use a severely simple style. (His range of tone and style was admirably reflected in a version of his works made by a 20th-century American poet, Marianne Moore.) La Fontaine’s example gave new impetus to the genre throughout Europe, and during the Romantic period a vogue for Aesopian fable spread to Russia, where its great practitioner was Ivan Andreyevich Krylov. The 19th century saw the rise of literature written specifically for children, in whom fable found a new audience. Among the most celebrated authors who wrote for them are Lewis Carroll, Charles Kingsley, Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame, Hilaire Belloc, and Beatrix Potter. There is no clear division between such authors and the “adult” fabulist, such as Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, Saint-Exupéry, or J.R.R. Tolkien. In the 20th century there were the outstanding Fables for Our Time, written by James Thurber and apparently directed toward an adult audience (although a sardonic parent might well read the Fables to his children).

Parable

In the West the conventions of parable were largely established by the teachings of Christ. The New Testament records a sufficient number of his parables, with their occasions, to show that to some extent his disciples were chosen as his initiates and followers because they “had ears to hear” the true meaning of his parables. (It has already been noted that the parable can be fully understood only by an elite, made up of those who can decipher its inner core of truth.) Despite a bias toward simplicity and away from rhetorical elaboration, the parable loses little in the way of allegorical richness: the speaker can exploit an enigmaticbrevity that is akin to the style of presenting a complex riddle. Parable is thus an immensely useful preaching device: while theologians in the period of the early Christian church were developing glosses on Christ’s enigmatic stories, preachers were inventing their own to drive home straightforward lessons in good Christian conduct. For centuries, therefore, the model of parable that had been laid down by Christ flourished on Sundays in churches all over the Western world. Pious tales were collected in handbooks: the Gesta Romanorum, the Alphabet of Thales, the Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry, and many more. Infinitely varied in subject matter, these exemplary tales used a plain but lively style, presenting stories of magicians, necromancers, prophets, chivalrous knights and ladies, great emperors—a combination bound to appeal to congregations, if not to theologians. An important offshoot of the parable and exemplary tale was the saint’s life. Here, too, massive compilations were possible; the most celebrated was The Golden Legend of the 15th century, which included approximately 200 stories of saintly virtue and martyrdom.

As long as preaching remained a major religious activity, the tradition of parable preserved its strong didactic strain. Its more paradoxical aspect gained renewed lustre in theological and literary spheres when the 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard began to use parables in his treatises on Christian faith and action. In Fear and Trembling he retold the story of Abraham and Isaac; in Repetition he treated episodes in his own life in the manner of parable. Such usage led to strange new literary forms of discourse, and his writing influenced, among others, the Austro-Czech novelist Franz Kafka and the French “absurdist” philosopher, novelist, and playwright Albert Camus. Kafka’s parables, full of doubt and anxiety, mediate on the infinite chasm between man and God and on the intermediate role played by the law. His vision, powerfully expressed in parables of novel length (The Castle, The Trial, Amerika), is one of the most enigmatic in modern literature.

Allegory

The early history of Western allegory is intricate and encompasses an interplay between the two prevailing world views—the Hellenic and the Hebraic-Christian—as theologians and philosophers attempted to extract a higher meaning from these two bodies of traditional myth.

In terms of allegory, the Greco-Roman and Hebraic-Christian cultures both have a common starting point: a creation myth. The Old Testament’s book of Genesis roughly parallels the story of the creation as told by the Greek poet Hesiod in his Theogony (and the later Roman version of the same event given in Ovid’s Metamorphoses). The two traditions thus start with an adequate source of cosmic imagery, and both envisage a universe full of mysterious signs and symbolic strata. But thereafter the two cultures diverge. This is most apparent in the way that the style of the body of poetry attributed to Homer—the ancient Greek “Bible”—differs from the Old Testament narrative. The Greek poet presented his heroes against an articulated narrative scene, a context full enough for the listener (and, later, the reader) to ignore secondary levels of significance. By contrast, the Jewish authors of the Old Testament generally emptied the narrative foreground, leaving the reader to fill the scenic vacuum with a deepening, thickening allegorical interpretation.

Old Testament

The Old Testament, including its prophetic books, has a core of historical record focusing on the trials of the tribes of Israel. In their own view an elect nation, the Israelites believe their history spells out a providential design. The Prophets understand the earliest texts, Genesis and Exodus, in terms of this providential scheme. Hebraic texts are interpreted as typological: that is, they view serious myth as a theoretical history in which all events are types—portents, foreshadowing the destiny of the chosen people. Christian exegesis (the critical interpretation of Scripture) inherits the same approach.

Typological allegory looks for hidden meaning in the lives of actual men who, as types or figures of later historical persons, serve a prophetic function by prefiguring those later persons. Adam, for example (regarded as a historical person), is thought to prefigure Christ in his human aspect, Joshua to prefigure the victorious militant Christ. This critical approach to Scripture is helped by the fact of monotheism, which makes it easier to detect the workings of a divine plan. The splendours of nature hymned in the Psalms provide a gloss upon the “glory of God.” The Law (the Torah) structures the social aspect of sacred history and, as reformulated by Christ, provides the chief link between Old and New Testaments. Christ appeals to the authority of “the Law and the Prophets” but assumes the ultimate prophetic role himself, creating the New Law and the New Covenant—or Testament—with the same one God of old.

The Greeks

Hellenic tradition after Homer stands in sharp contrast to this concentration on the fulfilling of a divine plan. The analytic, essentially scientific histories of Herodotus and Thucydides precluded much confident belief in visionary providence. The Greeks rather believed history to be structured in cycles, as distinct from the more purposive linearity of Hebraic historicism.

Nevertheless, allegory did find a place in the Hellenic world. Its main arena was in philosophic speculation, centring on the interpretation of Homer. Some philosophers attacked and others defended the Homeric mythology. A pious defense argued that the stories—about the monstrous love affairs of the supreme god Zeus, quarrels of the other Olympian gods, scurrility of the heroes, and the like—implied something beyond their literal sense. The defense sometimes took a scientific, physical form; in this case, Homeric turmoil was seen as reflecting the conflict between the elements. Or Homer was moralized; the goddess Pallas Athene, for example, who in physical allegory stood for the ether, in moral allegory was taken to represent reflective wisdom because she was born out of the forehead of her father, Zeus. Moral and physical interpretation is often intermingled.

Plato, the Idealist philosopher, occupies a central position with regard to Greek allegory. His own myths imply that our world is a mere shadow of the ideal and eternal world of forms (the Platonic ideas), which has real, independent existence, and that the true philosopher must therefore be an allegorist in reverse. He must regard phenomena—things and events—as a text to be interpreted upward, giving them final value only insofar as they reveal, however obscurely, their ideal reality in the world of forms. Using this inverted allegorical mode, Plato attacked Homeric narrative, whose beauty beguiles men into looking away from the truly philosophic life. Plato went further. He attacked other fashionable philosophic allegorists because they did not lead up to the reality but limited speculation to the sphere of moral and physical necessity. Platonic allegory envisaged the system of the universe as an ascending ladder of forms, a Great Chain of Being, and was summed up in terms of myth in his Timaeus. Plato and Platonic thought became, through the influence of this and other texts on Plotinus (died 269/270) and through him on Porphyry (died c. 304), a pagan mainstay of later Christian allegory. Medieval translations of Dionysius the Areopagite (before 6th century ad) were equally influential descendants of Platonic vision.

A second and equally influential Hellenic tradition of allegory was created by the Stoic philosophers, who held that the local gods of the Mediterranean peoples were signs of a divinely ordered natural destiny. Stoic allegory thus emphasized the role of fate, which, because all men were subject to it, could become a common bond between peoples of different nations. A later aspect of moral exegesis in the Stoic manner was the notion that myths of the gods really represent, in elevated form, the actions of great men. In the 2nd century bc, under Stoic influence, the Sicilian writer Euhemerus argued that theology had an earthly source. His allegory of history was the converse of Hebraic typology—which found the origin of the divine in the omnipotence of the one God—for Euhemerus found the origin of mythological gods in human kings and heroes, divinized by their peoples. His theories enjoyed at least an aesthetic revival during the Renaissance.

At the time of the birth of Christ, ideological conditions within the Mediterranean world accelerated the mingling of Hellenic and Hebraic traditions. Philo Judaeus laid the groundwork; Clement of Alexandria and Origen followed him. The craft of allegorical syncretism—that is, making rival systems accommodate one another through the transformation of their disparate elements—was already a developed art by the time St. Paul and the author of The Gospel According to John wove the complex strands of the Hebraic-Christian synthesis. Over centuries of quarrelling, the timeless philosophy of the Greek allegorists was accommodated to the time-laden typology of the Hebrew Prophets and their Christian successors and at length achieved a hybrid unity that permitted great allegories of Western Christendom to be written.

As a hybrid method, allegory could draw on two archetypal story lines: the war and the quest of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, which was paralleled by the struggles and wanderings of the children of Israel. Throughout the Middle Ages the figure of the wandering Aeneas (who, in the second half of Virgil’s Latin epic, Aeneid, fought bloody battles) was seen as a type in a system of hidden Christianity. Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, a prophetic vision of the birth of a child who would usher in the “golden age,” was read as a prophecy of the birth of Christ. Seen by many Christian commentators as the ideal allegorist, Virgil himself was hailed as a proto-Christian prophet. The blending of rival systems of allegory from widely assorted cultures became the rule for later allegory. Adapting the Latin writer Apuleius’s fable of Cupid and Psyche, Edmund Spenser combined its elements with ancient Middle Eastern lore, Egyptian wisdom, and dashes of Old Testament critical interpretation to convert the enclosed garden of the biblical Song of Solomon into the gardens of Adonis in The Faerie Queene, Book III. The pagan gods survived unharmed throughout the Middle Ages if wearing Christian costumes, because Christians were taught that pagan worthies could be read as figures of Christian rulers. The labours of Hercules, for instance, stood for the wanderings and trials of all Christian men; the Hellenic theme of heroic warfare took a Christianized form, available to allegory, when in the 4th century the poet and hymn writer Prudentius internalized war as the inner struggle of Christian man, suspended between virtue and vice. For complete triumph in explaining the significance of the world, Christianity needed one further element: a world-historical theory large enough to contain all other theories of meaning. This it found in the belief that God was the author of the world. His creation wrote the world. The world, read as a text, provided a platform for transforming the piecemeal, post-Classical syncretism into some semblance of order. Firmly established in the West, Christianity, for all its strains of discord, slowly achieved a measure of coherence. St. Thomas Aquinas could write its Summa. Theocentric, authoritarian, spiritualist, and word-oriented, the medieval model of allegory lent itself to the creation of the most wonderful of all allegorical poems, Dante’s Divine Comedy, completed shortly before his death in 1321.

Before this could happen, however, the Christian worldview was subjected to an important pressure during the 12th century. It may be called the pressure to externalize. Alain de Lille, Bernard of Sylvestris, John of Salisbury, and other forerunners of the movement known as European humanism “discovered” nature. Delighting in the wonders of God’s cosmic text, they brought theological speculation down to earth. Romances of love and chivalry placed heroes and heroines against the freshness of spring. Everywhere nature shone, sparkling with the beauty of earthly life. The externalization and naturalizing of Christian belief flowers most obviously in The Romance of the Rose, begun in the 13th century by Guillaume de Lorris and completed, in vastly complicated form, by Jean de Meun. The Romance personifies the experiences of courtly love, recounting the pursuit of an ideal lady by an ideal knight, set in an enclosed garden and castle, which permits Guillaume to dwell on the beauty of nature. With Jean de Meun the interest in nature is made explicit, and the poem ends in a series of lengthy digressive discourses, several of them spoken by Dame Nature herself. In medieval English poetry this same love of spring and seasonal pleasures is apparent everywhere—certainly in the poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, who, besides creating several allegories of his own, translated The Romance of the Rose into English.

Dante’s Divine Comedy has physical immediacy and contains an immense amount of historical detail. He anchors his poem in a real world, accepting Christian typology as historical fact and adopting an ordered system of cosmology (based on the number three, proceeding from the Trinity). Dante’s passion for numerology does not, however, block a closeness to nature that had perhaps not been equalled in poetry since Homer. He enfolds Classical thought into his epic by making Virgil one of its main protagonists—again to prefigure Christian heroism. Perhaps only William Langland, the author of The Vision of Piers Plowman, could be said to rival Dante’s cosmic range. Piers Plowman is a simpler apocalyptic vision than the Comedy, but it has an existential immediacy, arising from its concern for the poor, which gives it great natural power.

Romance and romantic forms provide the main vehicle for the entrance of allegory into the literature of the Renaissance period. The old Arthurian legends carry a new sophistication and polish in the epics of the Italians Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso and in the work of Edmund Spenser. By interlacing several simultaneous stories in one larger narrative, the literary technique known as entrelacement allowed digression—yet kept an ebbing, flowing kind of unity—while presenting opportunities for moral and ironic commentary. But although the forms and themes of romance were medieval in origin, the new age was forced to accommodate altered values. The Middle Ages had externalized the Christian model; the Renaissance now internalized it, largely by emphasizing the centrality of human understanding. This process of internalization had begun slowly. In rough outline it can be discerned in the belief that biological humours affected personality, in the adaptations of Platonic Idealism from which arose a new emphasis on imagination, in the rise of an introspective, soliloquizing drama in England. It can further be discerned in the gradual adoption of more self-conscious theories of being: Shakespeare’s Hamlet, finding himself by thinking out his situation, prefigures the first modern philosopher, René Descartes, whose starting point for argument was “I think, therefore I am.” Christopher Marlowe’s characterization of Dr. Faustus epitomizes the new age. Pursuing power in the form of knowledge, he is led to discover the demons of allegory within himself. He is an essential figure for later European literature, archetypal in Germany for both Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Thomas Mann and influential everywhere.

Modern period

With the Baroque and Neoclassical periods, allegory began to turn away from cosmology and toward rhetorical ambiguity. John Milton allegorized sin and death in his epic poem Paradise Lost, but allegory for him seems chiefly to lie in the ambiguousdiction and syntax employed in the poem. Instead of flashing allegorical emblems before the reader, Milton generates a questioning attitude that searches out allegory more as a mysterious form than a visible content. His central allegorical theme is perhaps the analogy he draws between poetry, music, and ideas of cosmic order. This theme, which generates allegory at once, recurs in later English poetry right up to modern times with T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

The social and religious attitudes of the Enlightenment in the 18th century could be expressed coolly and without ambiguity—and thus there was little need for spiritual allegory in the period’s literature. Oblique symbolism was used mainly for satiric purposes. John Dryden and Alexander Pope were masters of verse satire, Jonathan Swift of prose satire. Voltaire and the French writers of the Enlightenment similarly employed a wit whose aim was to cast doubt on inherited pieties and attitudes. A new vogue for the encyclopaedia allowed a close, critical commentary on the ancient myths, but the criticism was rationalist and opposed to demonology.

Under such conditions the allegorical mode might have dried up entirely. Yet the new Romantic age of the late 18th and early 19th centuries revived the old cosmologies once more, and poetic forms quickly reflected the change, with the Romantic poets and their precursors (Blake, William Collins, Edward Young, Thomas Gray, and others) managing to reinstate the high destiny of the allegorical imagination. The Romantics went back to nature. Poets took note of exactly what they saw when they went out walking, and their awareness of nature and its manifestations found its way into their poetry. Appropriate poetic forms for expressing this sensibility tended to be open, rhapsodic, and autobiographical—qualities notably present in William Wordsworth and in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example. Percy Bysshe Shelley is the most strikingly allegorical of English Romantics; he not only followed the Platonic tradition of Spenser and the Renaissance—with ode, elegy, and brief romance—but he also invented forms of his own, such as Epipsychidion, a rhapsodic meditation, and he was working on a great Dantesque vision, The Triumph of Life, when he died. Visionary masterpieces came from Germany, where Novalis and Friedrich Hölderlin hymned the powers of nature in odes of mythic overtone and resonance. French Romanticism, merging gradually with the theory and practice of the Symbolist movement (dealing in impressions and intuitions rather than in descriptions), in turn followed the same path. The pantheist cosmology of Victor Hugo, the central writer of the somewhat delayed French Romantic movement, created an allegory of occult forces and demonic hero worship. It is fair to say that, in its most flexible and visionary forms, allegory flourished throughout the Romantic period.

There also developed a novelistic mode of allegory by which prose authors brought fate, necessity, the demonic, and the cosmological into their narratives. Émile Zola used a theory of genetics, Charles Dickens the idea of ecological doom, Leo Tolstoy the belief in historical destiny, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky the fatalism of madness and neurosis. Nikolay Gogol revived the art of the grotesque, picturing absurdities in the scene of tsarist Russia. Even the arch-naturalist playwright, Anton Chekhov, made an emblem of the cherry orchard and the sea gull in his plays of those titles.

However its dates are established, the modern period is exceedingly complex in its mythmaking. Psychoanalytic theory has been both a critical and a creative resource; modern allegory has remained internalized in the Renaissance tradition. But Marxist Social Realism has kept to the externals of dialectical materialism, though without notable aesthetic success. In the free play of American letters, where Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry James (particularly in his later novels) had essayed an allegorical mode, the future of its use is uncertain. T.S. Eliot’s enigmatic style in a long poem, “Ash Wednesday,” may be related to his search for a Dantesque dramatic style, for which he also tried in plays, most obviously Murder in the Cathedral (a morality play) and The Cocktail Party (a philosophic farce). More clearly popular authors such as George Orwell and William Golding used the most familiar allegorical conventions. D.H. Lawrence shaped novels such as The Plumed Serpent to project a thematic, cultural polemic. W.H. Auden’s operatic librettos reflect once more the allegorical potential of this mixture of media.

Modern allegory has in fact no set pattern or model, although Surrealism has provided a dominant style of discontinuous fragmentary expression. The only rule seems to be that there is no rule. Science fiction, an ancient field dating back at least to the earliest philosophers of Greece, has set no limits on the speculations it will entertain. The allegorical author now even questions the allegorical process itself, criticizing the very notions of cosmos, demon, and magic. It may be that modern allegory has completed a vast circle begun by the first conflict between ways of interpreting myth, as revealed in Homer and the Hebraic prophets.